Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom

The Palestinian artists Basel Abbas (b. 1983, Nicosia, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (b. 1983, Boston, USA), based between New York and Ramallah, have collaborated since 2007 across image, sound, text and performance. Through collecting, sampling and layering of found and self-produced materials, their multidisciplinary practice excavates, activates and resituates stories of violence and disenfranchisement, questioning how the present is shaped, remembered and imagined.

Central to their practice is a non-linear approach to storytelling. Drawing on notions of amnesia and déjà vu, the artists create slippages between past and present, reality and imagination, familiarity and alienation. What the artists describe as “ poetics of resistance ” emerges through interruptions, repetition and overlap, opening spaces of resonance in which histories do not settle but remain active, unstable and insistently present.

Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom is the artists’ first exhibition in Spain. It centres on the eponymous audiovisual installation, informed by their most recent research, which explores the resilience of former Palestinian prisoners through song and poetry . The work is co-commissioned by MACBA, Nottingham Contemporary, The Bell/Brown Arts Institute, Brown University, and Kunstinstituut Melly, and forms part of the MACBA Collection.

Presented alongside earlier works, the exhibition traces a trajectory across nearly two decades of practice, revealing a sustained engagement with the poetics and politics of memory, and with struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine and beyond .